Abrupt Goodbye

Collaborative story telling

Abrupt Goodbye is a collaborative chatting game released by an indie game studio. The whole thing is browser based and all of the content is user generated. I think that it's possibly a first foray into a entirely new type of game.

The premise is supplied: A blind man is waiting for a train, a woman approaches him and talks.

Abrupt Goodbye is cool for a number of reasons:

- It is infinitely replayable - each completed game extends the content of the game a little bit, so the next game is longer and more varied.

- It's totally asynchronous, but puts two 'sides' against each other. Each side is several players working together without communicating.

- The system is set up to be self-improving - as you choose your conversational options, you vote for the most interesting ones. So there's a constant positive reform going on there.

You can crowdsource communication the wrong way, (as with some blog comments), or you can do something really great with it, like Abrupt Goodbye. Go play, it rules.

More OSS Volunteerism

Open source software isn't second-class volunteering. In terms of effectiveness per time spent on it, it's astoundingly helpful.

Because code is replicable and useful, it helps a lot of people. Giving away closed source software would be one thing, but open source code is reusable by other projects, viewable by people learning how to code, and fundamentally supported by the community. Writing software is also potentially research: solving problems in new ways is one of the ways the state of software advances. There's no limit to the number of people you're helping: the developers of Apache webserver deserve thanks whenever a page on the internet is served. (To anyone who thinks OSS puts coders out of a job, think of all the jobs the Apache foundation has created.)

Because coding, project management, UI design, QA testing, and all the other skill that go into successful open source projects take years to learn, the volunteer hours put into those activities are a scarce and extremely valuable resource. Suppose your friend, a lawyer, was looking for a way to volunteer four hours a week. Your friend can't decide whether it would be more helpful to bake rolls at a food kitchen or give pro bono legal advice to DV sufferers. Or maybe your teacher friend can't decide whether to teach ESL or do laundry for a church. Sure, your friends might enjoy both gigs, and they're all nice causes, but your friends have the opportunity to contribute skills which are much more scarce, and you'd probably recommend they do that.

That's why if you have skills or money to contribute to an open source project, you should act without hesitation: it's an unselfish endeavor that makes a big difference to a lot of people, and it's a great way to volunteer. It helps a lot of people in a real way.

And it definitely, definitely counts as volunteering.

OSS Volunteerism

Most of the time, volunteering occurs in an institutional way for a specific cause. People volunteer in a lot of different ways - for example, along class boundaries there's an interesting difference: People of lower social classes tend to donate time, effort, and money to religious causes, and to those who live below the poverty line. The higher classes tend to donate to and volunteer for causes that perpetuate their way of life - schools, colleges, art galleries, medical organizations. In addition to donating a larger percentage of their income on average, people of lower class tend to volunteer more of their time. That's interesting.

People who donate their time and effort to open source software projects don't always look at it as volunteerism. It's less institutional, it's not usually through a church or school, and an open source developer is unlikely to be sent an appreciation card or invited to a brunch for their efforts. Because software lives behind the computer, it's difficult to see how much work goes into it, and because it generally spreads on the internet it's difficult to thank an open source developer in person.

Few open source projects interact in person with their users. This is a distinction AmeriCorps calls 'indirect service'. It's not seen as more noble per se, but it is considered important and some programs demand a certain amount of it. It really does seem like a purer form of volunteerism to interact directly with a population than to serve by handling paperwork or answering phones or doing data entry.

It's definitely still volunteering.

Chat With Turk, Outline

How Turkchatting works:

1. A user says a phrase A to Turk
   
2. Turk remembers phrase A for later.
   
3. Turk thinks of some 'similar' things that Turk has previously said that resemble A. (These are potential phrases B)
   
4. For each of B, Turk checks to see what responses he has received when Turk said those. Turk picks one of these. This is phrase C.(If Turk has no good historic B phrases, he uses an untried one, something he's heard but never said, which is his phrase C.)
   
5. Turk responds with phrase C, which hopefully shares some context with phrase A, or maybe is a wild guess.
   

Right off the bat we have a system that has a lot of inherent randomness, even though it doesn't have any entropy - the page just collects user input and regurgitates it according to the above. It does get tuned with use, insofar as the list of phrases (and appropriate human given responses) grows over time. Of course, Turk doesn't track context at all, and doesn't even differentiate from the conversation to conversation on his own. From close up, it's very naive.

However, it works as sort of a conversational echo chamber - the user dictates the course of the conversation, whether they are greeting the Turk (he often returns the greeting), insulting him (he usually responds in kind to profanity), or asking questions about the nature of the page. He sometimes accuses the user of being a bad chatbot.

At best, the conversations generated by a mature Turk system more closely resemble the ones found in the front cover of an old yearbook than a live conversation, and that makes sense. I'm not sure what to do with him now, any ideas appreciated.

You should chat with a Turk

There's a little Internetology experiment I'd like to share with you. What if I paired up a random person on the Internet for a conversation? Actually, that's been done before.

What if I paired you up with a random person, but told you that it was a chatbot? Finally, what if that chatbot was non-stateful and just replied the best it could to everything you said to it? Would that the result of that be interesting or just confusing?

(Coarse language warning: Like I said, this is an experiment in chatting with strangers on the Internet...)

Try Chat with A Turk. Go ahead, I'll post the results and an overview of the algorithm here soon.

The physics of IP

Equity demands information-makers be compensated. But I don't think that it follows that people should have exclusive and enforced rights to information. We could reward them by paying them out of taxes, or paying them a pension, or some other means. Telling them they own forever the stuff they make but that they can sell rights to it just seems:

1. Bad for the greater good because it stifles innovation and hurts consumers and information producers alike
2. Hacked on, given the amount of paperwork and disputes the system generates
3. Completely impossible to enforce anyway

The problem is not just that the practical aspects are flawed, I think the deeper problem is the construct of ownership of a non-scarce good. We won't come up with any 'good' way to regulate the ownership of information because the idea is really silly from the outset.

If Newton's heirs started suing people over their use of the theory of gravity under some forgotten English law, we wouldn't just say "Oh, science doesn't count", we would say "You can't possibly own that, that's insane" but I don't think it's any less sane than owning a song or a drug formula.

That said I have no objection whatsoever on industry regulated appellations like champagne and feta. They don't claim ownership of ideas, just namespace. Not offensive to me. Not so much brand names either.

The Comment Transcompetency Halo Effect

When you're reading comments on a [blog|youtube|forum|news article], and it's the kind of toxic or wide-open environment that breeds bad comments, you might experience the following:

• Comment 1: hay guise i think this is cool i don't know about you but i like pickles
  
• Comment 2: THE PRESIDENT IS A SCIENTOLOGIST MY COUSIN TOLD ME ABOUT IT PASS THE WORD ON
  
• Comment 3: This post kind of reminds me of Neuro Linguistic Programming or something. Also, the president is not a Scientologist. He is, however, a robot.
  
• Comment 4: Macs suck, they dont have viruses becuz nobody even cares enough to right them lolol

After skimming those comments, I get the distinct feeling that "yeah, maybe the president is a robot." It's as if anyone who can string along a coherent sentence in a real landfill of a comment thread becomes a trustworthy informant, and things they follow with seem a little bit less crazy.

That, right there, is The Comment Transcompetency Halo Effect. Now that you're aware of it, don't ever be fooled by it again.